Writing Wrongs

Was up WAY too late last night, tried to sleep as long as possible, made it to work just in time to get a diet Coke and be at the 10 am team meeting. I was out of things to do, so I volunteered to test a new tool which was developed to help customers monitor a bunch of our boxes.

That didn't take long. It actually took longer to write up the results.

But it did make me late for lunch, which was Plan Aed for a trip to a new nails place I found on Yelp as close as Sassy Nails, but in the opposite direction on El Camino. Orchid Nail Lounge, found on Yelp. I didn't find it, probably because (looking at Yelp again) it isn't on El Camino but on one of its cross streets. But while I didn't find it on the right side where I expected,  on the left I saw Barbie's Nail Spa, so I took the first available U-turn to get there, but before I reached it I saw a much less provocative name, Nails by Kathy, next to  Thaibodia, which was also due for a visit. Kathy was not in, but her sister Ann was, but she was in the middle of a manicure and asked if I could come back at 2:30. No problemo, went to Thaibodia for lunch because their service is notoriously slow and I needed to kill an hour.

Ordered the drunken noodles, and yes, it took 20 minutes to arrive despite me being the only one ordering at the time. And it was dry and anything but drunken, with the wrong kind of noodles, and the chicken and onions cut too large. As I was digging in, she brought a salad-like object. And in another trip the soup. Yup, service still sucks there. I asked for "medium" spicy but it was more like 5 stars. So it took a long time to eat. The Thai Iced Tea was excellent, and helped detoxify the noodles, a sip for each forkful.

It didn't take as long to get my check as usual, and my change arrived in less than 5 minutes, so I was 15 minutes early back at Kathy's. The person being manicured was a very attractive woman somewhere near my age, with platinum hair streaked with black (a Quality hair dresser job) and she struck up a conversation. We had a nice chat, I gave her my card, she Ann said her name was Joy. Joy was wearing a light button-down sweater over a corset-like chemise. Nice figure.

Ann was lovely too, and single - very odd for a nails person. Kathy was out because her son had something serious enough for the ER.

So, two attractive single women who will talk to me, in one day. Yay!

Last night the director had announced we were doing publicity photos, half an hour early,  and asked me to bring two pairs of pants - khaki and black, a white dress shirt, suspenders and the costumer was bringing a bow tie. I remembered to grab the clothes and put them in the trunk of the car before going to work. But I forgot my script.

So I left work half an hour early to go home and get my script, and while I was there I got the mail, which included a lovely surprise from lemmozine - a set of his Indegogo project CDs. I'm listening to one now. He sounds different than in person. Mostly in a good way. When I Grow Up I Want To Be Snidely Whiplash is currently entertaining me. The singing is adequate but the finger picking is nothing short of amazing. And this isn't even one of his more challenging numbers. Thanks, Lem!

The lamb stew was done, and had started to cool, so I acheologicked a place in the fridge for the crock, and in doing so discovered a 3/4 full bottle of rosé I had completely forgotten about. It was from an experiment to see if a small dose of wine before be would help me sleep. It didn't.

Got to the theater about 5 minutes late, to find the director and most of the cast sitting outside. I asked if it was a case of the best planned lays, but director said no, it was just really nice outside. And it was, mid-70s. A Jekyll-Hyde day, started off with rain.

We went inside, I got changed into black pants, black suspenders and white long-sleeved shirt and bow tie. The photo session was a total clusterfuck, the music director and the stage manager both took pictures with real camera, and The Voice of The Plant used his cell phone. Here are a couple from the music director which came out okay:





Changed back into civvies and the plan was to block Act II, but as usual, the director got so caught up in minutiae that we didn't make it to the end. Had I known that would happen, I could have gone home an hour early, because I get eaten early in the act, and don't appear again until the finale.

I'm called for tomorrow, but he gave us Wednesday off, mainly because for some unknown reason neither the theater nor the usual rehearsal backup place was available. I may also be called for Sunday, but I need to send a message to the choreographer because she probably doesn't need me. I'm called for Thursday, at the backup location, but that looks like it may also be a waste.

Meanwhile, while punching holes in the revised script I'd printed Sunday, I found the black nozzle had clogged toward the end, so had to re-print the last 12 pages. Punched them and loaded it all into the folder behind the original. I need to print index tabs and transfer my blocking notes, but maybe that will be Wednesday.

Home, made a frozen dinner.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Rehearsals

Costco, picked up the box of scanned slides and the two DVDs they were scanned to. Had just enough time to copy them to the PC before heading back to Consonance. There are so many of the solid musician types there this year, made me miss lemmozine. Seanan is elsewhere, which I think raises the level of musicality a bit, and lowers the chaos factor. The latter may or may not be a good thing. Brooke is also elsewhere, and I miss her music & energy & creativity. And am sad that tragedy struck her in a way which makes it impossible for me to sing my favorite song of hers which I am capable of singing. There are a couple I like better but my mouth doesn't know what to do with the lyrics.

I got there in time for the 2x10s, the first person on stage sang boring bardic balladish balderdash. Steve Savitsky came down from his transplanted home near Seattle and sang his old tune about how his house is always open to all on one night of the week, except maybe now it isn't. And he sang a song he wrote about/for Naomi, which was very touching and I would have asked him for a recording to send to my cousin who has MS except for the bit about how Naomi's SO stands beside her, because cousin's husband bailed when she got the diagnosis. Brett Glass, whom I had not seen in so long I still don't recognize him, sang a cute Time Lord song accompanied by his laptop orchestra. Jane Mainlander, who is often the most entertaining person at the con, bored me with a couple of songs about Sherlock Holmes spin-offs. One was a tribute to Joan in Elementary which I thought fell short. Needed a more upbeat tune. Nick pleaded con crud and instead of singing told the story of the Pied Piper. His voice sounded fine, and while he is a wonderful storyteller, it didn't work for me. I needed a trick ending, or something.

International guest Rika Körte, who impressed me singing harmony last night, did an entire set above her range, and the sound people made it worse by over-modulating. Nothing in her set was memorable. A good chunk of it was in German.

Interfilk guests Robin Holly and Jonathan Turner were mostly entertaining. Jonathan did most of the singing, he has a bad habit of swallowing the words at the end of a line, especially punchlines. He did a funny one about how he won't sing Bob Dylan.

Home, pulled some weeds using the claw thing I'd bought a while ago for that purpose, but many of the weeds were too deeply rooted to get them all.

Did some more processing on the photos, renamed them, and started the upload to Flickr. Left the machine on as I returned to the con.

Clare Cook was a first-timer with a 30-minute set, mostly Clancy Brothers, and she thinks Irish Rovers originated the song The Merry Minuet. She updated it in a way which was charming and awkward and not entirely necessary. I liked her alternative ending:
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.. woman..person of indeterminate gender

And that brought us to the GoH concert, Margaret & Kristoph. Mark Osier sang their intro, to the tune of Let It Go from Frozen. Brought down the house when he changed the chorus to "They're our GOH" (pronounced "go")

As usual, M&K gave a consummate musical performance with only a tiny bit of filk content, and they brought up several people to help, with Brett Glass playing bass on a few numbers, one tune he had Brett, Paul Kwin, Maya & Jeff, Jim Partridge, Paul Kwinn and Beckett Gladney (on harmonica) to sing about things lost in the dryer, and lost beer.

They got a standing O, did an encore, and then things broke up for open filk. I went across the street looking for food (it was almost 10 and most places were closing) and found a restaurant called Chef Wang's Indian Chinese. Staffed by Indians, I was the only non-Indian in there. I ordered the Manchurian lamb but I think they gave me beef. It was very spicy. My sinuses and tear ducts have been completely irrigated. The corn & crab soup used fake crab. I can check this place off my list.

Home, put the final touches on the Flickr set, caught up on FB and fed the cat. And had some ice cream as an antidote to dinner.
( Some photos behind the cut )
Flickr link is -->here<-- 


 
Plans for tomorrow:
Study lines
Con at noon
Rehearsals at 7

The piano tech arrived a couple of minutes early, I was on the PC, VPNed into work and actually working.

Tall Hungarian fellow, the first thing he did was claim that tuning it the right way would cost more than buying a new piano. He makes the mistake that I actually play the piano, though he does understand the concept of emotional attachment. No, that's not the phrase. I'll think of the right one and poke it in later. Sentimental value. That's the phrase.

He had sent me his prices, and I knew we were looking at about $300. He way underestimated how well built this relic is, and was sure we would be busting strings right and left at $80 a string. The piano was flat by about 2%. He was afraid that tightening the strings, which are almost all the originals, would break them if he did it all in one fell swoop like all the other piano techs have done for the past 46 years. So I let him do two passes at $45 and an hour each. He also wanted to adjust the action, which is something it needed, but he gave up before he had finished the 5 & 6 octaves. I use 5 a lot, 6 not so much.

I've probably told the sentimental value story before, ( here it is again )

So that was my day, plinking sounds in the background as I read documents & email for work.

During a break I updated my theater resume, it needed the new address, and was set to print it, but could not find any card stock. Tried photo paper, but it's a 2-sided resume, and the back of Kodak paper doesn't take ink.

I quit working at 5, and headed for Fry's to get some card stock. But they have castrated their stationary department, and had none. So I slogged in rush hour traffic up to Office Depot, and paid way too much for a ream. Used to be able to buy card stock in smaller doses.

Since I was now right across the street from Safeway I went there to stock up on produce and frozen food. Oh my, the eye candy was out in force. The woman in charge of the self check-out is DDG, looked like she ought to be on a ski slope posing for a breath mint commercial. Or chapstick. So beautiful! And many customers were in the "mommy, I want one!" category. Enjoyable trip.

Home, big envelope in the mailbox, turned out to be the docs for the replacement insurance. Fully approved, they included flood insurance for no extra $$, and it's for full replacement cost of the home, not the cheap-o $150k which Allstate had lined up. I dashed off email to Escrow Lady with the details, because insurance for the first 2 years is suppose to be paid out of escrow, and asked who else I need to contact. In theory the old insurance gets canceled as of today because I didn;t fork over the bogus $200 they claimed I owed because the community doesn't have a staff member living here full time.

Printed the theater resume on card stock, printed the audition forms and filled them out.

Dinner was the rest of the Marie C lasagna and some garlic sourdough bread.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1 with the boss, maybe. He moved it to Thursday the last 2 times.
I expect to hear from the director about coming in to audition.  
Maybe set up the telescope on the tripod. It's a VERY solid tripod. Too bad it's a new moon. I should check to see in SJ Astronomy club is getting together for a dark sky night.

Most of this morning was spent watching a football game I wasn't really interested in, because the ones I wanted to watch are not on free TV or ESPN here. Boo, hiss. I thought about going to the movies but my tummy was being cavalier, and it seemed better to stay where there was a pause button and a handy loo.

Was feeling settled enough to go out for the 2 pm monthly gathering of the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra (TACO) which bills itself as a fun, no-fault place to play (or just listen to) music. With 60 people it was not a chamber orchestra, but a symphony.

It was, however, terrible.

Not the players, most of them sounded adequate or better. But the two people conducting were awful. Everything was painfully slow. When there was a choice between conducting in different counting schemes, they always chose the most difficult one to follow. Nobody conducts in 6/8, people, it's done in 1 or 3. Slavonic Dances sounded like English country dances on Quaaludes.

The choice of arrangements was mostly poor. Worst Fiddler on the Roof medley ever.  Ditto Phantom.

An hour and a half of playing, 45 minute break to nosh, drink wine and socialize, and the balance of the 3 hours for announcements and playing. I had to leave at 5 so I missed playing  Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head so slowly I could dodge between the rain drops.

My trumpet playing was horrible. I had not played trumpet at all since leaving Seattle in 1999, and it would take a lot more practice to play in a real band. I almost kept up with the other trumpets.

Got to Starbucks just in time to meet Janice, we had a good chat. If all goes well I'll invite her to see the new place Friday, before there is a cat living there. She is gravely allergic.

During TACO time, I missed a call from my last living aunt. I'll call back tomorrow.

Got email from my rep, she says the seller will be out of "your home" by 5 pm tomorrow. I am not pleased. We moved Escrow closing a week earlier, to tomorrow at the seller's request, she was supposed to be out today. Yesterday, technically. I don't care, I'm not moving till a week from Thursday, I don't even need to be in the place to measure things till Turkey Day. It's just the principle of it all which bugs me.

Having mild anxiety moments this evening. Too many things up in the air, I guess. Still haven't heard from Humane Society about returning Kaan.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Team meeting
Maybe I can haz new home. Maybe.
Day of the Doctor in 3D 10 pm maybe. I've seen it on TV, I usually don't like to see things twice in a short span of time.

No low Hgl this morning. Yay!. But this new insulin is not handling the dawn syndrome so my pre-breakfast readings are way too high.

Up early, figured that 40 minutes was worth trying to sleep, and the alarm woke me at 7. No shower because I didn't want to re-open the cut on my finger, but the hasty bandaging job had to go, I needed to cut it off, and then iodined it and bandaided it.

Work - team meeting was interesting, one of the team had automated our ad insertion server simulator. In Plain English: a program which plays ads during the TV show. His demo didn't work, I tried it at my desk and found a handful of mistakes. But he did a lot of work to get that far, so props to him.

Spent the day finding and verifying old bug fixes. Most of them were easy to test. Some would have been easy if the person who filed the bug had included a screen shot, and had written a more descriptive title.

Lunchtime I followed the GPS to the closest to work U-Haul, but it turned out to be a gas station which sometimes (not today) acts as a drop-off point for U-haul vehicles. They had no supplies. Will try a known good one tomorrow. After that wild goose chase I went to Bennigan's for lunch. Big salad, and of course the main dish arrived way too soon, and even then it was not as hot as it should have been. They called it "drunken pot roast" but they use wine, not the hard stuff, so that's lame. For dessert I ordered the pineapple upside-down cake which is FAIL with extra FAILsauce. Picture a martini glass, filled halfway with canned crushed pineapple in heavy syrup, a slice of pound cake stuck into it from the side, with the other side taken up by a squirt of whipped cream. There was supposed to be rum in it, but there wasn't. Awkward to eat, had to keep dipping the cake into the pineapple. At lest this time the service was good, but I would have been happier if they had not seated the couple with the LOUD CHILD across the aisle from me. There were dozens of empty tables elsewhere.

The eBay item sold for $15 more than the low bid price. It was a major project to get it to fit into USPS "large" flat rate box with enough bubble wrap to protect it. I'll drop it off tomorrow.

Got a reply from the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, their next meeting is 11/27, which I'll go to if I'm not up to my ears in moving. Otherwise the last Sunday in December, if they don't cancel because of the holler days.

Watched a fairly exciting last quarter of football, and also managed to get my laptop working with the new company's VPN. Reading the directions helped. I had emailed them to my personal address, but had forgotten that they would show up on the laptop's email download.

Today's packing accomplishment was topping off the "top of the piano" box, which has been sitting next to the piano since the last move, with the beads from my NOLA art hanging, two other items hanging on the livingroom walls, a piece of art bought at Westercon66, one of my two Microsoft Windows beach towels, and a book I was going to auction at BASFA until I remembered how horrible the auctions have been lately.

---

I forgot about "There". A long time ago an acquaintance from a Usenet group asked for volunteers to beta test There.com, a virtual world. I became a lifetime charter member, but never got the hang of the place and eventually stopped going. After a while There.com was shut down because the acquaintance decided to focus on DoD contracts which used this technology. Linden Labs did a better job with 2nd Life, and most There users switched over.

Today I got email that There.com was back, and I was still a charter (free) member.

Small world story - that acquaintance later married a friend from theater, and is a major supported of her Dragon Productions little theater in Redwood City.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
UPS
PO
U-Haul
Pack a little more.

After the latest Windows update the PC bluescreened. Had to go to safe mode/no network and do a system restore to last week. Seems to be working now. Turned off automatic updates.

Boring day at work, the only useful thing I did was write up a doc on all the new company classes I took, and email it to the team.

Lunchtime I took the non-freeway route from work to the mfg home, then back via Sizzler. Round trip was about 27 minutes. Might have been faster if I remembered that the new place is virtual north** of the current place.

Email from the rep claiming I sent CU statements for July and September, not August. I was sure I had sent all three, so captured them at work and emailed them to her.

Home pulled up the email, and sure enough I had missed the August one. Weird because it is in the folder on the desktop where I've been keeping all the paperwork.

Looked up the listing online, Redfin says it's pending sale. Yay! Sent the MLS# to Baltimore sister who works for a financial giant, and has access to that. She claims it's the one she chose for me. I didn't know she was looking at specific listings. But it's good she has come around. Her impression was "manufactured home" was a euphemism for "trailer" and "trash".  I looked at listings near Baltmore, hoping to show her she was wrong about that, but everything within 50 miles is $42k mobile dwellings, half a notch up from an RV, in that they are towed not driven.

Got the mail, no check from the broker yet. 50-50 chance it would be there today, 90% tomorrow. I'll want to walk it into the CU office when I get it. That's for the deposit and  closing costs. The mutual fund already sold and the funds are listed as available - that's for the downpayment. I won't need a check for that for a while yet.

Peninsulaires voice lesson #5 started as a clusterbleep, sort of. Whoever was supposed to conduct the warmups was not there on time, so we got a guy who had done it before, but wasn't very good at it, but after 5 minutes he had to go to rehearsals and pulled a chorus member off the risers who had no clue what to do. But there were enough officials around whose brains were pickable, so it was only half a fail.

Next up was the lesson, given by the same guy who has been doing it. Most of the time was spent reviewing the first 4 lessons, which gave him very little time to add anything new. As usual, he kept us standing way too long after each singing round. When he was done, another guy, who had been leading the singing of an actual song all these weeks (Grand Old Flag) got us up on the risers and put us all in the sections our voices matched, but unlike a real chorus, he had the bases on one end, the baritones on the other and tenors & leads in the middle. Most choruses like to go from high to low. He did a little bit better job this time of teaching the individual parts, but they are completely non-intuitive except for the lead part (which is the melody we all learned in grade school or in my case on late night TV from Jimmy Cagney). We sung it about six times, and it sounded horrible. Partly because it was in a key way too high.

I bailed at the break, not interested in seeing the highly annoying chorus sing two numbers.

From there to Safeway, I needed ice cream and frozen dinners. But first, this one had a CU ATM, so I deposited two checks.

Home, tried to fit the frozen stuff into the freezer compartment, but had to pull out the curried chicken (3 servings in separate freezer bags), and one frozen dinner, and had a second one for dinner. The Klondike bars had to be released from their boxes and stuck in any available nook and cranny.

--
Trivia: my uncle Dave was born in 1922. 91 years old.
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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
???

Work, finally finished the script, total of 6 test cases covered. Would have been 7, but discovered that a spec change obsoleted one test, which meant i had to file a bug report because they didn't document the spec change. And I'll have to write new test cases to cover the change, but not this week.

Went for Thai food with Automation Guy but 17 groups of engineers decided to take their whole team there, so we went to the sushi place instead. Why do they tempura-fy broccoli and sweet potato? Gross.

The Loan Arranger did not have an answer for me about leased land mfg homes. Home rep cutie wanted to add another one to our tour Sunday, but it is in totally the wrong location, so I said no.

Home by way of UPS store, 2013 special quarters and a YA book called Smarty Marty which was billed as a baseball primer for grade school kids, written by the woman who does the sidelines coverage for SF Giants baseball on TV. Then to 7-11, Amazon locker held 12 packets of Werther's sugar-free caramel hard candies, which are my new bedtime snack.

In the mail was my refund from DMV for the license plate they refused to make. Silly rule, but it saved me $98 and the embarrassment of telling AAA to return the plates.

Also in the mail were blank checks from Discover Card for me to use to transfer balances from other credit cards. They have been shredded. Idiotsidiotsidiots, don't they know that those things get stolen and are identity theft tools?

Watched the Browns beat the Bills. The Bills looked better in their tighty whitey pants than the browns did in their brown pants. Announcers pissed me off by starting the game wrap-up while there was still plenty of time for Bufallo to make a comeback. Which they didn't which also pissed me off.

Sunnyvale's rec district pamphlet had several classes I was interested in, and the beginning ukulele classes are at a time I can actually go to, so Saturday I think I'm going to trek to the Ukulele Source in San Jose's Japantown and buy a starter uke, armed with suggestions from lemmozine and two other Facebook friends, one of whom built his own.

And just when I was ab out to give up theater, Palo Alto Players sent an audition notice for Young Frankenstein, the musical. Tryouts in mid-November, show runs April-May.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work - Automation Guy is giving a class almost all day. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Had a painful night last night, my elbow would not stop hurting. Finally took 2 nighttime Tylenol, which didn't do much for the pain but made me stay drowsy when I finally hauled myself out of bed at 10. Part of the delay is just as I was trying to get up, Kaan, jumped on the bed and parked himself against me.

My plan was to sleep till 10, anyway, due to not enough sleep Thursday night.

After my usual Saturday routine, I hunted for and finally found the crock pot (it was at the back of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, behind the paper bag collection) decided it was too small and instead found the giant wok-like pan I'd bought for this kind of project. Its flat bottom is anodized aluminum, the right size for a large burner, and it curves out to a much wider circular bowl. Non-stick surface, very solid, great for not burning things.

Into that went three cans of coconut milk (the white kind), three cans of water. Heated on 5 (out of 10) for 15 minutes, then stirred in 1 Tbsp Thai yellow curry paste. A taste test said "what curry paste?" so I added another dose. Better, but still a bit mild. Better mild than too strong, I figured.

Added the chicken drumsticks, covered the pan, and gave it half an hour to come up to a simmering boil. Added baby corn, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, because those don't overcook. Turned the heat to 3, another half hour it was at a boil (much to my surprise), added the straw mushrooms and green peas and turned the heat down to 1.5.

Let that simmer for an hour, which was just a wee bit too long, but the drumsticks were holding together, so I caught it in time. Sort of. Could not spear them with a fork, they were too tender, so I used a slotted spoon to put them into my official potluck food containers (they fit perfectly). Next I used a wok strainer to scoop out the small stuff, and distributed it fairly evenly between the two containers.

What with the added water and chicken fat, the curry sauce was way too thin, and there was way too much of it, so I boiled it down. Added a dash of fish sauce and a little dark brown sugar suggested by Nancie McDermott's recipe book, Quick and Easy Thai. And I also added another Tbsp of curry paste, since this was going on top of and not inside the chicken.


That took about 2 hours, but after 1.5 it was time to pick up a package at UPS, so I turned off the stove and did that. Then I decided to try out a new massage place I saw in The Metro, punched it into the GPS and discovered the address was the parking lot of the Santa Clara American Legion post. :-(

Not to be discouraged, I went to the one I've been using, not too far from home, and Jessica made my right shoulder feel much better.

Heading home, passed Fry's, remembered I needed to buy some canned air, so I cut off an obnoxious SUV which had been pacing me as I tried to slow down to change lanes behind him.

Canned air was on special, 3-fer, so I got a a pack of that, and also a pack of microfiber cloths. Looked for but did not find backup software. Decided not to spend $700 on an 8TB backup drive. Or settle for the small package of inkjet internet shipping labels (they only had the large economy size in laserjet ).

Home, emptied the console storage bin of 8 CDs, which are waiting to be shelved where they belong. I had been listening to the London cast recording of Matilda which is what was in the Amazon locker yesterday. I am disappointed in the music. One tune is memorable on first play, two more might be after listening a few more times, and there is a monologue near the end which is a non-ingenue actress' wet dream. It is not listed on the track list, they have buried it after several seconds of silence after the final song, not in its own track. ( Read more... )

From the album, which includes a lot of dialog, it is clear this is one of those shows which will be spectacular as a production, as long as they find a super-strong set of children, because it's all about kids in an exclusive private school.

The reason for my interest is I was in a production of The Wizard of Oz in 1986, Dorothy was played by a very talented girl named Lesli Margherita, who is now starring in the Broadway production.
This is her then:
( Read more... )
This is her now:( Read more... )

Finished the coconut milk curry reduction in between flipping between the very wet Oregon Ducks and Stanford games (Stanford playing WSU in Seattle for some strange reason), and miffed because none of the channels I get was showing my 17th-ranked Huskies. I had to rely on my Baltimore sister's FB updates for that. Also peeked at the Mariners-A's game, which showed the April Fools broadcast, Mariners leading in the 6th by a hefty margin.

Poured the curry sauce into each of the containers on top of all the other ingredients and let it seep in. Back into the fridge, and after it was clear that Oregon and Stanford were blowing out the competition, I fired up the PC and made card stock tents naming the dish and its ingredients.

Caught up on FB, Twitter & LJ, and also took a look at mobile home park listings, and found 5 nearby which are for old farts.

Plans for tomorrow:

Put on my band uniform, glue in my teeth, grab my horn and participate in Ye Olde Town Band's last concert of the year.
Potluck dinner afterward.

Took my time getting to work because today was Company Picnic day, so from noon on there was no working. I checked on the machines, did some serious research and then went to the park. The food was plentiful and varied, but not very good. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the caterers had BBQ in their name, but not in this particular offering. Soggy salad with fruit mixed in, a fairly decent macaroni shell baked thing, chicken breast slices in some kind of lemon sauce, gristly slices of roast beef, sausage made from unidentified body parts and sawdust. The ice cream, OTOH, was excellent, 8 flavors to choose from and lots of toppings.

All the group tabes were taken so I sat at one of the couples tables, and was joined by Soon, one of the women on my team. She is from Kota Baru, Malaysia, which I visited a few times when I was living in southern Thailand. I would go there for lunch on weekends. So we have Malaysian food in common. Very different from Thai food, most of it, though they overlap some. Soon is actually Chinese-Malay, so she speaks Chinese with three of the team who are from there.

After lunch there was a short volleyball tournament, I got some good photos which I need to process, tomorrow I think.

That was over at about 4, there was softball after that but softball is not photogenic, so I went back to the office to pick up my cooler, and then home for a shower and a nap.

After the nap there was enough time, so I pulled the crystal litterboxes out of storage, cleaned out the noisy smelly leaky clumped litter ones and put the crystal ones in their place. Now that I know that nothing I can do will keep Kaan from pooping in Verboten places from time to time, the crystal litter is the easiest to deal with. They last at least a week unattended, completely deodorize, and are very quiet.

At 7 I headed to the Peninsuliers' voice lessons, about 2 miles up the road from me. They wanted us there at 7:15 to get name tags, for a 7:30 lesson.

They had a folder with my name on it, and a name tag on a lanyard inside, as well as a syllabus and sheet music for "She's A Grand Old Flag".

By 7:40 there were about 50 of us, plus the actual chorus. There was an introduction which mostly said the group was a barbershop harmony chorus, and pointed out the people in charge of the group and the lessons. They gave us a short break to grab complimentary water bottles, and when I got back my seat had been taken by a newcomer who is about 6'6" in all directions. Asshole. And he was, too.

We had three instructors. The first one had us up on risers, students and chorus, and taught us some nonsense tune/vocal exercise. He blew it, forgot a piece of it, which was pointed out by one of the regulars in the Baritone section. Next guy came in and did it the right way, but it was still pretty lame and kind of like being asked to do a math exercise at an interview because the interviewer knows the answer to that one exercise. Not a bad exercise for near the end of warmups before a concert. Totally inappropriate as the first thing to teach beginners.

The lesson was very basic, he had us do some positioning (I wouldn't call them exercises) to illustrate how to breathe from the diaphragm, and how to stand and be comfortable and relaxed. Some of them did the opposite of that for me, some of them were Standard^®. We stood for about half an hour as he spouted off about singing, and there was maybe all in all 5 minutes of breathing exercises and singing tones in that half hour.

The chorus joined us at 8:45, and another instructor went to great lengths explaining the sheet music for "Grand Old Flag", which was lost on anyone who doesn't read music. He had everyone sing the first 16 bars of melody a couple of times, but it is too high for anyone except a tenor, so I sang it down an octave. Then he sang the bass part, which is bizarre barbershop harmony, and we tried it with basses singing that part and everyone else singing melody, but it was totally non-intuitive, even after three go-rounds I didn't get it.

When he was done, they invited us to stay for the last half hour of chorus rehearsals, I stayed for two run-throughs of a Sinatra tune You Make Me Feel So Young to which they had added a long introduction and changed the harmony to barbershop. It sounded great, but wrong. And this group doesn't just stand and sing, they earnestly emote and move and gesture, sometimes matching the words of the song, sometimes looking like they forgot to take their Immodium.  

Behind the cut is a quartet doing the song with that inane intro
( Read more... )

Home, made a frozen dinner unfreeze, fast forwarded through the second day of America's Cup racing. Love the graphics, don't love the announcers. Love the views of huge crowds along the Embarcadero and of Alcatraz and the GG and new Bay bridges.

Watched the latest Who Do You Think You Are? with that flamer from Big Bang Theory who said "wow" 3,647 times. Yes, I counted. When shown proof that one of his ancestors in Paris hosted Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in the early 1780s before the French Revolution, he seemed to have no idea how extraordinary that was. I was also disappointed that he didn't try to follow another branch further into the past from a degreed New Orleans area doctor pre-Civil War. His ancestors must have been something special for him to be graduate #55 from the south's first medical school.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
Get cash from the ATM
Costco? Starbucks?

Played with the Nexus 7. I am very pleased with it.

Accomplished at work what I had set out to finish, and also verified a bug was fixed in today's latest build. It was a fairly complex setup, took about an hour.

Manicure revealed that Michelle (owner and the one who does my armor plating) is a Vietnamese beauty pageant winner. She is gorgeous, and I would love to have her model for me. Two of the other workers are also quite pretty.

Lunch at Dairy Belle, grilled cheese was delicious. But the one and only employee disappeared when I was ready for my chocolate dipped cone. Boo, Hiss.

Home, Kaan pooped on the bathroom rug. I need to remember to keep that door closed when I'm away. Nice to have a washing machine, for events like this.

Band rehearsal, we practiced most of the pieces on the menu for Sunday's concert. Mostly whipped through them, but there was some remedial work because this was the first time we had a full turnout since Summer started. Boss man says this is the best band ever. A large part of this is how big it is, and how very completely the parts are covered. Not many concert bands can boast four tubas or four Euphoniums, or enough trombones to cover every part 3 times over. And we have a killer trumpet section.

I took home my copy of the Carmen suite, it was copied awkwardly, needing two page turns. Scanned it and printed it out so it just needs to be flipped once.

Bought a beater baritone horn on eBay. There were about six which were candidates, but this was the only one with a rotatable bell, and billed as ready to play. I'll sell my 4-valve to Starving Musician if the eBay one lives up to the claims. Shipping cost 1/3 of the total price, but still under $300 which is half what Starving's cheapest goes for. I expect about $800 for my current one.

Time to check my blood sugar level and go to bed.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
???